


through and through with fire

by notbecauseofvictories



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Hela Lives AU, Life Aboard the Spaceship Asgard, Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-07
Updated: 2017-12-07
Packaged: 2019-02-11 15:10:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12937908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notbecauseofvictories/pseuds/notbecauseofvictories
Summary: It takes the combined strength of Thor, Loki, and Valkyrie to drag Hela onto the Grandmaster’s ship, though Loki gets a split lip for his trouble and Hela’s nails leave deep gouges in the leather of Thor’s vambraces.





	through and through with fire

It takes the combined strength of Thor, Loki, and Valkyrie to drag Hela onto the Grandmaster’s ship, though Loki gets a split lip for his trouble and Hela’s nails leave deep gouges in the leather of Thor’s vambraces. They barely have time to close the enormous bay doors before she manages to claw herself free, and hurls herself at the walls, howling. 

The steel groans under the assault. 

Valkyrie’s gaze lingers on the dents left by Hela’s increasingly desperate thrashing. When she glances at Thor, her eyebrows are raised.

“I agree,“ Loki grits out, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. When he grins, there’s blood between his teeth. “What now, brother? I’ve never been on this side of the…misguided redemption effort.“

They all flinch away when Hela lets out an unearthly, undulating cry that eats up all the air in the room and rings the of the walls like the rattling of spears. It gouges its way through their skulls, and even Valkyrie turns away, her jaw tight.

(Thor is half-blind and still shedding sparks and yet a nameless grief wells up inside him, something ancient, vast and ugly—an agony that begins in blood and ends with it and comes to sorrow in between. It makes him think of the pulsing murals of Hela and Odin, ringed with red and worlds beneath the heels of Sleipnir. It makes him think of his father, gold dust on the wind over the sea. It makes him think of a song he might have heard once, long ago—)

The sound of it goes on forever, or seems to. It is an eternity later when Hela collapses to her hands and knees, keening softly. After a moment, Thor dares approach her—sidelong, giving her room to move away, if…But she allows herself to be led away to a makeshift cell, expressionless and still trembling.

“I need a drink,” Valkyrie says afterwards, glaring at a point over Thor’s shoulder. There’s something in her expression that kills any protest he might have made; Thor nods and steps aside.

Loki has already disappeared. Thor would not hazard a guess to where.

Later, Thor will look out at where the burning ashes of Asgard hang amid the stars. He almost doesn’t notice when Heimdall comes to stand beside him—he’s got a blind side now, he’ll have to start taking that into account. Still, suddenly there is a warmth at his shoulder and the deck feels more solid beneath his feet, and Thor smiles. 

“Asgard lives in her people, right?” Thor says, and Heimdall hums a thoughtful noise 

“As you say, my king.”

But Asgard was also somewhere just… _there_ , where a constellation of stars that was once Thor’s home is burning out. He will never again walk the halls Frigga walked, or sit on the throne Odin built. He’ll never run through the corridors after Loki, or spar with the Warriors Three and Sif in the courtyard. Asgard is its people and he is Odin’s heir by right, but—

“It has been an age since Odin’s songs were sung,” Heimdall says suddenly, and Thor shudders back to himself. Heimdall is still staring out the vast window, expressionless. “I did not know he’d passed on those secrets to another.”

“What?”

“Your sister,” Heimdall says. At Thor’s blank look, he smiles slightly. “You were there. As Asgard died, she—” 

“Do you mean the  _screaming_? That was not like any song I’ve heard.”

Heimdall says nothing for too long; long enough that Thor shifts to look at him fully. The corner of his mouth quirks upward, but there’s no humor to it. “Asgard was once a very different place, my king. We sang different kinds of songs.”

Thor huffs, turning back to the window. “It was horrible.”

“Yes,” Heimdall says easily. “It was.”

Thor casts one last, longing look at the place where Asgard hung amid the stars, then turns to walk back to the bowels of the ship. He vaguely thinks of trying to find the Hulk—the Big Guy had disappeared during boarding, sneering at Hela before lumbering off into the depths of the Grandmaster’s ship. A thought occurs to him, and he turns back. 

Heimdall is outlined by fire and stars, and for the first time it strikes Thor that Heimdall said  _we_ , said  _we sang different songs_. “She sang as Asgard died?” Thor asks quietly. There were no windows in the loading bay, how could she have known—

“Good night to you, my king,” Heimdall says. He does not turn from the window, and after a moment, Thor goes.

  

* * *

 

It takes sixteen days—more or less, the Grandmaster’s ship doesn’t seem to be programmed with any particular diurnal cycle—for the ashes of Asgard to burn themselves out. Or at least, to slip from the sight of any but Heimdall. (Space is vast and black, either way.)

Hela goes from keening to silence deep as the grave. She lies on her back on the bunk in the makeshift cell they have arranged for her; her eyes do not open, and if Thor did not come and watch closely for the rise and fall of her chest, he would think her dead.

“There was a story, my father told me once,” Thor says, squinting down at the glass full of purple liquid. The Grandmaster’s ship is not equipped to transport a nation away from its dead planet, not really, but where rations are scarce and the Asgardians are running the life support systems ragged, the alcohol store is excellent. “It was about a king of Alfheim, with three sons. How—”

“She slaughtered all my sisters, Thundergod,” Valkyrie says stiffly. “I don’t want to hear this story.” 

The hardness of Valkyrie’s expression does not hide how wounded her eyes can be. At least, not as well as she seems to think. 

(She has a bruise on her shoulder she’s also hiding badly, but that is not worth discussion—if anything, Thor has been grateful for her sparring matches with the Hulk. His people gather to watch them, and marvel at the strength and courage of the Last Valkyrie, even if there’s more showmanship than actual violence.

Once, though, he wandered into the great chamber to find the Valkyrie conducting combat lessons, correcting clumsy grips and awkward stances with sure hands and the occasional caustic aside. She’d met his gaze over the heads of the crowd and rolled her eyes, but Thor had seen the light she carried with her, after.)

“It was a good story,” Thor mutters, but he lets the matter drop.

 

* * *

 

Loki comes and watches Hela, sometimes. Not to—he’s woven half a dozen charms around the doorway, into the walls. No one will disturb her here, and no one with violent intent can cross the threshold. He’s not sure if the holding charms are enough to keep her contained, but they’ll slow her down if she does decide to try escaping.

Still. He comes, and keeps watch over her. Cloaks himself in illusion and simply stands, following the rise and fall of her breathing. (They have the same nose, almost the same brow. Loki wonders if that’s—he’s never been sure how much of his appearance is the Aesir disguise Odin wove for him, and now, watching her, he wonders if—)

Once, her mouth opens and she exhales, licks her lips.

“I know you’re there, little Odinson,” she says in a rasping voice. Her eyes do not open, but the corner of her lips quirks upwards. 

Loki turns on his heel, and flees.

 

* * *

 

The story goes: there was a King of Alfheim, and he was dying. 

Because he was dying, he summoned his three sons before him, and said,  _to each of you, I will give a share of what is mine. Ask for what you will of me._

 _Father,_ the eldest said, for he was warlike and strong, and thought most of the throne and the power he would wield from it.  _Father, I have bled for you and for Alfheim, leading your armies into battle. None of my brothers love our land and the glory of our dead as I do. Give to me your spear, so I may raise it as your firstborn, and truest heir._

(The King grieved to know this was true, for he had shaped his firstborn into a weapon with his own hands and loved him, even if it was meted with shame. The King had been called shield-shaker and bale-worker, king of the gallows and caller of ravens—how could he not love his son, conceived in blood?)

 _Father,_ the youngest said next, for he was full of terrible ambition and craving for glory, and believed his father’s crown the shortest distance to sating that hunger.  _Father, I am the cleverest and most subtle of my brothers, no less your heir for choosing the winding path of cunning. Grant to me your seat at the feast-table, where I might charm and flatter and bring Alfheim to new glory with riches and song._

(The King had not felt regret, though he knew his youngest son would bring his own share of grief to him. But even now the King was called Swift-in-Deceit, and Riddler, Maddener—his youngest son was not the first starving wolf welcomed into the court, and the King loved him for his hunger.)

 _Father…_ the second son said, though until now he had been silent. He too was a warlike creature, seeking glory from battles fought and won, but there was a streak of—something else in him, an undimmed brightness that the King could not find in himself. (The King loved him best for this, though he tried vainly to hide it from his other children.)

The second son looked upon his father, who was dying, and said:  _I want the sky._

And because the King loved his sons, and they had all spoken truly, he gave to each of them as they asked. The eldest son became keeper of the glorious dead and as long as he stood in Alfheim, none could defeat him. The youngest son was given the crown for a time, though in the end it was his hunger that swallowed Alfheim and brought it almost to ruin.

And the second son inherited the whole of the sky.

(”You’re not very subtle, O Wise One,” Frigga informed Odin after the telling was done, not looking up from her distaff. The seiðr shone as she worked it through her fingers, and Odin smiled, to look upon her weaving songs instead of dirges.

“It is only a story, my queen,” he said, and kissed her hair.)

 

* * *

 

“What do you plan to do with her?” Heimdall asks. “If she is loosed on Midgard, I fear it will not end well. For any involved.”

There’s no need to clarify who he means. Hela is the only ‘her’ aboard the Grandmaster’s ship, the only name no one seems to have the courage to say aloud. Thor knows some of the people have started calling her ‘Elder Sister’ out of sheer terror, as though her name will summon her—

(She isn’t much of an enemy of Asgard now, paler by the day and curled up on her side beneath a thin blanket, unmoving as a statute except for the breathing.)

“She is my sister, Heimdall,” Thor says. His voice sounds tight and unhappy even to his own ears, though he had been trying for kingly admonishment. She is his  _sister,_ he has a duty. He’s had a brother and a duty for so many years now it’s second nature, like breathing—he forgets sometimes, that it’s not, for anyone else.

“Yes, I know,” Heimdall says. His mouth thins. “That’s my concern.”

 

* * *

 

Loki is hard to find, these days, but Thor generally starts where people aren’t, and works backwards.

Nevertheless, Thor is surprised to find him on one of the lower levels, crouched at the center of the floor in an enormous storage room. Loki startles when Thor clears his throat, almost losing his balance. Thor grins, and lowers himself to sit a distance away, careful not to smudge—whatever it is Loki’s drawing in white chalk. It looks like some of the designs their mother used to embroider, all interlocking knots and unraveling spirals, trees and snakes and birds in flight.

The floor on this level is cold, too close to the outer hull, and Thor says as much. If only to break the silence. 

Loki’s smile is not a smile at all. “I can’t say I’ve noticed.”

Thor huffs. “Your fingers are practically blue.”

Loki does look up at that, fixing Thor with a pointed look. “Oh,” Thor says, wincing. “Oh, right. Does it…always do that?”

“Only if I’m not concentrating,” Loki mutters, and returns to his chalk drawings.

Thor watches him, settling back on his hands. Loki has chalk in his hair, and hums as he works; it’s a horrible, somehow-familiar melody that makes Thor’s skin crawl. “What is it you’re doing, anyway?”

“Our sister’s song,” Loki sighs, rising to his feet. He has chalk streaked across his knees, down one sleeve. “The one she…when we first brought her aboard. I’ve been working on the infernal thing for weeks, I can’t figure out…”

“Heimdall said it was Odin’s,” Thor offers, and Loki’s gaze suddenly snaps to him.

“ _What.”_

Thor shrugs. “He said it had been ‘eons since anyone sang Odin’s songs,’ or something like that. Our father must have passed it on.”

Loki’s expression goes blank, and his gaze drops from Thor to the whorls of white chalk spread across the cold steel. He stands very still for such a long time that Thor clears his throat again. “Loki…?”

“ _Fuck_ our father,” Loki snarls with a naked viciousness. He walks back across the maze of white chalk dragging his feet, and leaving skid marks through the lines and cutting one chalk horse’s head off with a swipe his heel. It hurts Thor’s eyes to look at the design that way, all those gaping holes. Like knife wounds, slashes in a tapestry.

Loki marches past Thor without stopping. He has chalk streaked down his backside too.

Thor sighs. The sound reverberates in the empty storage room. “Good talk.”

 

* * *

 

“I can feel you lurking, little Odinson,” Hela says, though she does not raise her head or open her eyes. She’s pale, softer-looking—some of her armor has melted away, and the kohl around her eyes is smeared. There is a shadowed gauntness to her face that is worse, somehow, than the bloodlust and madness had been.

Loki shivers into being from nowhere. “I keep watch over you, Odinsdottir.”

“Hah,” Hela scoffs. She has their mother’s mouth, Loki thinks with a jolt, even though it looks strange set in beneath their father’s eyes. It makes him curiously bitter, knowing that—

“What, no rejoinder?” Hela asks, and he realizes too late that she has opened her eyes, and is staring at him from across the room. She does have Odin’s eyes; pale and blue as ice, searching as a Norn’s. It plucks on the vicious tangle of longing and hate in Loki’s chest. (It had been seven days and the sjaund had been drunk—well, it had been something golden and stickily alcoholic from the Grandmaster’s private reserve, but Loki had drunk it,so surely that was the same thing—and what did Loki Odinson have to inherit from his father?)

“He taught you the nine songs,” Loki says. It comes out bitter and accusatory, and he feels his neck grow hot when Hela laughs.

“The songs I know, king’s wives know not,” she sing-songs, enough music in it for Loki to feel the seiðr prickle across his skin. She laughs again, and the sound is worse, hollow. “While your power stinks of our mother. How nice, for Odin and Frigga to each fashion their own weapons.”

“Much good it did you, elder sister.”

Her face doesn’t fall, but it stumbles before smoothing out again. “What good has it done you, little brother?”

He—

He could hurt her. It might not even be difficult—she is pale and sick from going so long without food, and he can feel how weak her seiðr is without Asgard to anchor and feed it. He could unmake her, bury her under the earth or in the void, or unwrite her very existence. He could choke her with his hands, as his fingers itch to. She might even thank him, to be saved from her long, slow slide into nothingness.

(Loki had begged Odin to teach him the nine great songs that built Asgard; had thrown himself at his father’s feet and crawled on his knees and— _They are not your inheritance,_ Odin had said, not unkindly.  _I intend them for another._

Loki had gone away and nursed his bitterness alone, for it seemed wasteful to spend such seiðr on Thor, who would not appreciate its intricacy nor its power.)

“If you intend to murder me, you will have to explain it to our brother, after,” Hela says, and Loki stiffens. At his look, she laughs again. “Oh, don’t be so offended. Odin looked exactly the same contemplating my death—you’re not special.”

“Thor would understand the necessity.”

Hela looks at Loki overlong, and Loki struggles to keep his expression still. “Would he, though?” she finally asks. “I admit our brother is still a stranger to me, but he does not strike me as a man who knows how to choose  _necessity_ over misplaced compassion. Particularly when it comes to his blood.”

Loki doesn’t have any answer to that.

“You could talk to him,” Loki finds himself saying, and even Hela looks surprised at it. “He worries.”

Hela looks away, and Loki almost misses her mutter, “He got that from mother,” under her breath. For some reason, it strikes Loki as impossibly funny.

She actually lifts her head when Loki laughs. Mostly to stare.

“He  _did_ ,” Loki chuckles, unable to help it. The thought of Frigga’s inheritance is too wonderful and terrible to bear without laughing at it. Hela props herself up on her elbows, and Loki beams. “When we were very young, Odin used to call him Frigga’s second-best girdle, because he was always hanging off her waist. I haven’t thought about that in decades.”

Hela snorts, and then looks annoyed at herself for it. “I’m surprised you haven’t thought about it,” she says mildly. “His look of patient and loving disappointment is a mirror-image of hers. As much as your murderous look is Odin’s. Every time he gazes at me I feel the inexplicable need to apologize for getting blood on the weaving…”

Loki hums, oddly pleased by the comparison. Something to inherit from his father after all. “I cannot begin to count how many times he ran to her, crying over some harmless illusion or light stabbing—”

“As thought it were my fault every time I touched the threads they tore, or rotted under my fingers—”

“Oh, the wailing and tears, you’d think I’d run him through with Gungnir just because I’d ruined his favorite tunic—”

“Was it any wonder I preferred father’s songs, you can’t tear or get mud on a song—”

The silence that falls in the wake of this pronouncement is awkward, thick as snow and deafening. Loki cannot help watch Hela’s face, as her expression flickers from uncertain and then to stony stillness again. He turns away, before she can find him looking.

 

* * *

 

 

“Our sister says you remind her of mother,” Loki informs Thor cheerfully. He’s whistling the ugly song again, and Thor rolls his eyes as Loki breezes past.

It takes Thor a beat more, and then his head jerks up from the map he had been studying.

“Wait,  _what?”_

 

* * *

 

Hela is sitting cross-legged on the pallet, when next Thor goes to her. She is still pale, but she looks up at his approach and arches an eyebrow. (She’s so like Loki in her mannerisms, which should be more than impossible. Thor suddenly wonders what father was like, when he was young.)

“Lightning-bringer,” Hela says coolly.

“Odinsdottir. You look—well.”

“I do not, but it’s good to see our mother taught you manners.”

Thor does not pretend the mention of Frigga does not pain him. Though his father’s death is fresher, that is a deeper wound. “I bring Asgard’s best wishes for your swift healing, Hela.”

“Well, now you’re just lying,” Hela scoffs, and even her  _smile_  is Loki’s, like a wolf baring her teeth.

“No, you’re right, everybody hates you,” Thor says, and Hela’s smile widens. “But I’m glad you’re…recovering.”

She snorts. “Yes,  _recovering_. With Asgard gone, you and your brother would have little trouble restraining me now.”

“We would like not to have to, going forward.”

Hela’s gaze turns thoughtful. “You set a dangerous precedent, Odinson. Keeping one mad kinsman close to you is an indulgence, but two is a worrying trend.”

Thor is suddenly very tired. “You’re not mad, sister. A little unstable, maybe, but so is Loki and he’s only—” Thor doesn’t know how to finish that sentence well, in a way that won’t involve tolling the deaths Loki has to his name.  _He’s only slaughtered one of the nine realms and led attacks on two others,_ does not seem a persuasive argument.

Hela is looking at him with amusement. “How clarifying.”

Thor sighs. “Do you want to come drink the funeral mead or not?”

Something softens in her expression. “It has been more than seven days,” she says, unfolding her legs and coming to the edge of the bunk. Hela, Goddess of Death, rises to her feet uncertainly, and Thor moves closer out of instinct—he does not touch her, would not dare, but he is within reach if she needs a steadying hand.

She very briefly clutches at his wrist, her knuckles white, and then her touch is gone again

“I know,” Thor says lamely and too loud, when he realizes how thick the silence has become. “Heimdall’s already made that point, often. But we were very busy, with the whole—saving Asgard from yours and Sutur’s wrath thing. Didn’t get a chance to do it properly.”

Everyone is still there where Thor left them, when he went to fetch Hela. Valkyrie falls silent in the middle of a loud insult of Loki’s prowess on the battlefield, and Loki turns—

Heimdall had wanted the people of Asgard there, to witness the oaths given and the drinking of the mead. To use the sjaund to cement in the peoples’ minds that Thor was Odin’s successor, rightfully claiming his inheritance upon his father’s death. In a rare moment of consensus, Loki had agreed—had offered to stand beside Thor and drink only water, so that none would mistake who was King of Asgard.

Thor had refused, and invited only Heimdall and Valkyrie as witnesses.

Loki crosses the room, and stops just short of Hela. “Elder sister,” he says, and Hela smiles in a mirror-image of Loki’s own.

“Little brother,” she answers. “Shall we get this overwith, then?”

Valkyrie comes to the edge of the makeshift feast table—Thor thinks it was likely something else, under the Grandmaster’s ownership, but he scrubbed it clean and covered it with a length of silk, so hopefully that is sufficient. With the scrape of metal upon metal, Valkyrie draws her sword. Dragonfang gleams, unearthly, in the low light of the room. 

She takes up her guard, and looks to Thor. Nods.

“This is not how this should be done,” Heimdall says lowly. As though they are not just a few, all gathered around this not-quite-a-table—as though the others cannot hear.

“This is how I want it to be done,” Thor says. It is not mead in he goblet, but he tried to select something that tasted similar from the Grandmaster’s stores. It shines, a dull amber in the light.

Heimdall sighs. “Very well, my king.”

Thor picks up the cup, holds it out. After a moment, Loki’s hand curves over his. Hela’s touch is next and cool, hesitant. Her expression is difficult to read.

They all three of them have a slight curve to their first finger. Thor would not have noticed that, if it weren’t for their three hands, half-entwined the goblet.

If they were in Asgard, Thor thinks, there would have been songs. Great sagas of Odin’s bravery and strength recited to the accompaniment of drums and flutes. Thor would have presided, and all of the court would have drunk the finest mead, dined on roast beast and honey. And when the time came, Thor would have led the procession to the highest balcony, where he would have drunk Frigga’s mead from the bowl smithed by the Sons of Ivaldi. He would have drunk until he was full with it, and then his father would be free of all the duties that had burdened him in life, and come to rest in Valhalla as he deserved.

Instead, Thor is in a cold and empty storeroom in the belly of ship, drinking sickly-sweet alcohol from a copper cup. His siblings—both of whom have tried to kill him, now—watch him warily.

He is not sure whether it’s wrong to be glad of it.

“To Odin Allfather,” Heimdall intones. Loki is very pale, his mouth a thinned line, and Hela’s hand trembles where it holds the cup. “May we meet you again in the halls of Valhalla.”

“May we meet again, in Valhalla,” Thor murmurs. When he lifts the goblet to his lips, he can feel Loki’s hand against his chin, and Hela’s nails scrape his cheek.

They pass the cup between them, until it is empty.

 

* * *

 

_What was it that Odin All-Father whispered to Baldur as he bent above him, the flames of the burning ship all around?_

_He whispered of a heaven above Asgard that Surtur's flames might not reach, and of a life that would come to beauty again after the world had been searched through and through with fire._

 

from “The Children of Odin” by Padraic Colum


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